7th Grade - Gateway 1

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 7 partially meet the expectations for having the supporting content enhancing focus and coherence simultaneously. Overall, the instructional materials miss opportunities to support major clusters of standards with non-major clusters and as a result, the supporting content does not always engage students in the major work of Grade 7.

• Supporting content can be found in chapters 6 and 7 (7.G) and 8 and 9 (7.SP) for the major standards in 7.EE. Chapter 8 supports the major standards in 7.RP.
• Chapters 6 and 7 do not support the major work of the grade 7.NS.
• In chapter 6, lesson 6.1 does not include opportunities to work with rational numbers, and in lesson 6.2, only five of 25 problems include rational values. Students are only assessed with whole numbers on checkpoint quiz 1, and checkpoint quiz 2 only includes 17.5 as the hypotenuse of the triangle in number 1, which is the only rational value on the assessment. On the chapter 6 test, three of 23 problems include rational values.
• In chapter 7, there are limited opportunities for students to practice manipulating rational numbers with the exception of pi.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 7 partially meet the expectations for having an amount of content designated for one grade level as viable for one school year. Overall, the amount of time needed to complete the lessons is partially appropriate for a school year of approximately 170-190 days.

• As noted in the pacing on pages T42-T45, the book totals 150 days of instruction, leaving time for review and enrichment, additional activity labs, assessments and projects.
• Days beyond the 150 suggested by the materials can be used for assessment purposes or utilizing some of the guided problem-solving items.
• Given the instructional materials not allocating enough time to major clusters of the grade as addressed in indicator 1b, these instructional materials would have to be supplemented with other materials which means these materials may not be viable for one school year.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 7 partially meet the expectations for having materials that are consistent with the progressions in the CCSSM. Overall, the materials partially give students extensive work with grade-level problems, and grade-level concepts are not always explicitly related to prior knowledge from earlier grades. Also, the materials partially develop according to the grade-by-grade progressions, with non-grade-level content clearly identified.

• There is little focus on 7.EE.B.3 (chapter 5) and much focus on 7.EE.B.4 (chapter 2), but 7.EE.A.1, which helps with generating equivalent expressions, is a very small part of chapter 2 (labeled as simplifying expressions instead of generating equivalent expressions).
• This text addresses number operations entirely in chapter 1 without properly interweaving Grade 6 understandings. This text also fails to provide adequate opportunities to explore rational numbers beyond chapters 1 and 4, leaving students unprepared for the work of the next grade.
• There is a beginning-of-course diagnostic test provided to test skills that have been taught in previous years, and at the beginning of each chapter, there is a "Check Your Readiness" that addresses skills acquired from previous years that relate to the new material.
• The majority of the Grade 7 standards require students to apply skills to real-world contexts, but lessons do not provide extensive opportunities to engage in real-world problems.
• Exercises and chapter tests lack extensive work with fractions, and there is often only one challenge problem per section, giving little opportunity for learning grade-level content in greater depth.
• Each lesson provides approximately five to 10 grade-level problems.
• Each lesson provides a "Math Background" that relates grade-level concepts to prior knowledge, but they do not make explicit connections to when the skills were introduced or how they relate to the new concepts.
• At the beginning of each chapter, there is an "Activating Prior Knowledge" section, but these passages containing essential understandings from Grade 6 are only found in the teacher edition.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 7 partially meet the expectations for having materials foster coherence through connections at a single grade. Overall, the materials show some strengths at including learning objectives that are visibly shaped by the CCSSM cluster headings, but the materials do not always connect two or more clusters in a domain or two or more domains in a grade when appropriate.

• In general, the chapters are shaped by the cluster headings.
• Cluster heading 7.EE.A.1 is found in lesson 2.2, but is not adequately addressed.
• 7.SP.A is found in the lesson 8.3 objective, to use data from random samples to make inferences about the populations.
• The sections on geometry are aligned to one standard per section.
• Some of the statistics sections have more than one content standard, but they do not connect to more than one cluster.
• 7.RP and 7.G domains are connected in lesson 4.6 by using proportional reasoning to find missing values of similar figures, but students are only asked to sketch one model in number 16 and not to the actual size given in the problem.
• 7.RP and 7.EE are linked in lesson 5.6 by connecting the percent of change equation with proportional reasoning.
• The Grade 7 focus on ratios and proportional reasoning and expressions and equations is not linked clearly with supporting clusters found in chapters 6 and 7 (geometry) or chapters 8 and 9 (statistics and probability).